The Mets’ announcement [1] that they would not retain their manager should have constituted a five-alarm bulletin. Wire machines across the city should have shaken. Daytime programming should have been interrupted. This is traditionally head-of-state transfer-of-power stuff. The helicopter is on the south lawn. San Clemente awaits. Somebody grab a bible and swear in our next presumably fearless leader to preserve, protect and defend the sovereignty of 41 Seaver Way.
Except it didn’t feel that way at all Monday when Metsopotamia learned via tweet (certainly not on Facebook) that the Mets would, not unexpectedly, decline the option on Luis Rojas’s contract. Dry corporate language for bloodless times. Sandy Alderson issued a statement of gratitude before acknowledging “a change is needed at this time”. Rojas’s cordial response was helpfully embedded in the very next paragraph. No spouting off to favored beat guys at the contemporary equivalent of Toots Shor’s for this deposed manager. He could even return to the Mets in some “yet to be determined capacity” if he chooses, per the release.
Maybe it’s because of the professionalism of the process that the end of the Rojas run (222 games managed, 119 games lost) landed as almost agate type, rating a line above so-and-so being activated from the 60-day IL. Or maybe it’s because we’ve been through so many of these kinds of announcements of late that they’ve lost their ability to stir even the most engaged of Mets fan souls. In about four years’ time we’ve witnessed the offing, by whichever euphemism was handy, of Terry Collins, Mickey Callaway, Carlos Beltran and now Rojas. We also watched Sandy Alderson step aside as general manager in the middle of 2018 for health reasons; an ad hoc front office structure fade away a few months later; Brodie Van Wagenen make a splash in the fall of 2018; Brodie Van Wagenen’s splash transform into a puddle by the fall of 2020; Alderson re-emerge as Mets president; would-be whiz kid Jared Porter not reach Opening Day; Zack Scott go on administrative leave in his first and presumably only interim season handling what had been Porter’s GM job; and, oh yeah, the team go through the machinations of being sold, not sold, then finally sold. You can only stop the presses so many times before the presses shrug.
We used to name eras for managers. Except nominally, I’m guessing we won’t be doing so for Luis Rojas, pilot of the New York Mets across one short season and one practically endless slog. There was undeniably a Stengel Era; a Hodges era; a Johnson era; a Valentine era. I’ve occasionally referred to the Art Howe Era, probably ironically, but not without belief those 2003 and 2004 teams were Howeish to their core.
Because COVID protocols continued to limit most media-player interaction to virtual, it was hard to divine if the Mets of 2020 and 2021 bore the indelible stamp of Rojas. Nobody’s ears reached the clubhouse to be whispered in. Nobody reported with regularity on what One Met Said or had the chance to make close-up observations and inferences. We who pay attention from the outside heard just about everything uttered for public consumption as it was broadcast by the TV and radio rightsholders, while little else appeared to be passed along privately. Nobody’s gripes were recounted juicily if anonymously. There were few surprises filling out the game stories.
If any Met didn’t love Luis Rojas, that Met didn’t mention it over Zoom. If any Met didn’t love anything — besides not being relentlessly cheered as the club slid from first to third in the National League East — that Met didn’t let on. The bulk of the postgame talk was about how positive everybody remained, lose or win (mostly lose after a while), and how everybody was thrilled to be a teammate of everybody else.
A happy clubhouse. A content clubhouse. Come October, a dark clubhouse.
Was the complacent tenor of the team the doing of the manager? It’s difficult to tell. Maybe it’s irrelevant now that Rojas is no longer the manager. My sense is Luis pursued his responsibilities as directed by whatever internal consortium decides how a ballclub is to be managed these days. The year before he took over for the trash-canned Beltran, Rojas was the nebulously titled quality control coach, liaising between the c-suite and the bench, and probably one of the people who weighed in on how the Mets should be managed in a given situation and/or generally speaking. Being promoted to manager likely didn’t empower him to act solely from instinct.
You will read no 1969 retrospective without being reminded every five pages that Gil Hodges’s leadership was that season’s true MVP. When you watched Once Upon a Time in Queens, you understood anew that Davey Johnson framed the 1986 “we’re gonna dominate” attitude we continue to idealize. Bobby V was Bobby V and we never forgot it between 1996 and 2002. Yet we’ve been informed for close to twenty years — roughly since Valentine’s swashbuckling style fell out of fashion in Flushing — to forget our romantic image of what a manger is or does. Alderson was a modern hero in Moneyball (the book) for calling out the antiquity of the skipper as Leader of Men. Nope, Sandy told Michael Lewis, the field manager is essentially a middle manager, an apparatchik to whom “the fate of the organization” should not be left. When Rojas entered the family business in the mid-2000s, he surely knew which way the wind was blowing. He might have aspired to be as admired a manager as his dad was. He likely discerned that earning admiration within the industry as it evolved from Felipe Alou’s heyday wasn’t going to stem from being a singular figure.
Luis Rojas indeed never gave the impression he was a lone wolf. He matured as a minor league manager in what had become a collaborative enterprise. Sure enough, nearly every decision he explained for two years was delivered as something “we” decided. I never thought he was deflecting responsibility for what didn’t work or being modest about what did. He had coaches by the fistful surrounding him and an expanding analytics department besides. The manager is one among “we” these days. I doubt Rojas chafed at carrying out instructions rather than being trusted to his own devices. His rise through the ranks indicates he fit baseball’s prevailing ethos.
Whatever portion of the most recent Mets manager’s job it was to relieve a starter or implement a hit-and-run, it was, by all indications, less than the share of mind he gave over to taking the temperature of the room. Keeping talent happy and hopefully productive seems to be what a major league manager is hired to do. Winning may not have topped the list of Career Objectives Luis presented when he interviewed for the role he held. The Mets of 2020 and 2021 appeared to be enjoying themselves, if nothing else. They rarely appeared bothered by their collective shortcomings. Everything was about “just trying to stay positive” when it wasn’t about disseminating playful (and maybe not so playful) hand gestures.
I honestly don’t know how much emphasis Luis Rojas placed on winning when addressing his troops. I don’t know how much troop-addressing a manager really does. I assume the idea of baseball players as “troops” is hopelessly outmoded, but it’s language we’re used to. Did Rojas try to fire up his charges? Or did maintaining an even keel supersede all emotional concerns? This is the man who said managing late in the season required no change in approach from managing early in the season. The arc of the season — and the Mets’ fortunes as it careened toward its end — suggested otherwise.
Those who claim to be somewhat in the know praise Rojas as a “good baseball man”. Does anybody get ostracized as a terrible baseball man? I take it to mean a good baseball man in 2021 doesn’t make enemies and communicates effectively within the realm of saying what people up the collaborative chain wish to be said. I used to think being a good baseball man meant teaching a light-hitting middle infielder how to bunt for a base hit when the third baseman is playing back. Maybe Luis did that, too. While I wasn’t sorry to learn he won’t be the Mets manager in 2022, I took no particular glee in his dismissal from the dugout. If he agrees to be reassigned within the organization, that’s fine. He’s not a pox on the Mets. He just wasn’t the right individual to guide or motivate a group that underachieved during his two seasons at what we still call the helm, no matter that the helm probably doesn’t exactly exist.
The Mets will name a new head of baseball operations. The baseball operations executive, with input from Alderson, Steve Cohen and whoever else gets listened to, will choose a manager. The business of state will resume. We’ll just try to stay positive.